I didn’t learn the term “puffery” until law school. And incidentally, I didn’t learn it in a class; I learned it in the course of a volunteer project called Street Law. It involved a few volunteer lawyers from the community working with law students to go to some inner-city schools to give a short presentation on a specific topic, with the goal of getting the kids interested in the law and making the profession seem more accessible. Our topic was about just this subject: the line between false advertising and mere puffery. The kids seemed really engaged, I know I had a lot of fun, and now there’s a group of about 20-some-odd 20-somethings out there in the world who have known the term since middle school.
This is all makes sense to me (and selling what you have versus what you hope to have can be difficult).